In this section I would like to tell you about the kinds of research that probably will change your ideas about the possibilities of studying the elites and society.

Resource elites analysis

When we speak about politics, the most important is influence. And at some point my colleagues and I were wondering what “influence” was and if its components are the same in different regions of Russia.

So, in the mid-nineties we first applied the model for calculation of influence in Russia, adapting the one designed by Vladislav Borisovich Tikhomirov, a well known professor and one of my teachers at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. This technology makes it possible to explore a subject’s influence through weighed summation of resources. It takes only to assess the resources weights with experts help to understand the way which resource is distributed among the elites and then build a mathematical model of regional elites resources distribution in any region or country. It turned out that the semantic saturation of the word “influence” varies in different regions (due to the different weights of the resources influence).

Initially, we thought that this technology will work most effectively in forecasting of political development scenarios in a particular region during an election campaign. However, this model was the only that gives mathematically precise rendering of political risks for investors who intend to enter the regions.

Of course this study is a more complex research project to be implemented, rater than conventional sociology, as it requires involvement of a large number of well-informed experts in every region under the conditions of complete confidentiality. Today the total number of our experts in Russia is more than six thousand people.